CHAPTER 6 “I Thank God for the Fate He Has Given Me”
In many ways, the late 1970s were years of accomplishment and triumph for Fr. Gleb Yakunin. He developed a devoted following in a coterie of young people who saw in him a crusader for social justice. He sent copious amounts of information to the West, which centered on documents about specific injustices that demanded attention. He believed himself to be on the cusp of a religious reawakening in the Soviet Union that was predicated on revealing large cracks in the state’s relentless assault on religious beliefs. He had a young family whose adoration for him was unceasing, even in difficult times, and he, in turn, deeply loved his wife and three children. And he was fulfilling what he believed to be his primary purpose: service to a church whose leadership rejected him and to a suffering people who wanted to practice their faith without state interference.
But if these were years of achievement, they were also years of hardship and adversity. Fr. Gleb and his colleagues on the Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights remained under the suspicious eye of the KGB. As the victims of three house searches by the security police in 1979, Yakunin’s family lived in fear that he would be charged with criminal activity.
Conspiracy theories have been an integral part of political life in Russia and the Soviet Union. Fostered by certain factions in the government, conspiracy theories identify specific groups or individuals who aim to subvert the social order and overthrow the government. Governments generally sponsor conspiracy theories to strengthen public order and focus attention on so-called public enemies. In his classic work In Pursuit of the Millennium, the historian Norman Cohn finds that the rise of apocalyptic thinking takes place during times of great social and economic conflict, when social groups feel adrift.1 Similar tensions underlie the spread of conspiracy theories, especially when ideological underpinnings of the social order are threatened. The actions of Yakunin’s Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights and the religious reawakening of Soviet youth in Moscow, Leningrad, and other cities imperiled a centerpiece of Communist Party ideology. Anxiety over these movements reverberated in KGB communications.2 Unwilling to tolerate the further development of such activities, the authorities planned an immediate response.
On April 13 and 20, 1977, a two-part article appeared in the popular newspaper Literaturnaia gazeta (Literary Gazette), which struck a hard blow at Yakunin and his associates. Written under the byline of one Boris Roshchin, it carried an ominous title, “Svoboda religii i klepki” (Freedom of Religion and the Slanderers).3 Whether Roshchin actually existed is questionable; the name of such a person had appeared earlier in articles designed to besmirch the reputations of certain people whom the government had targeted for criticism. Most likely, “Roshchin” served as the pen name for a KGB operative or as a composite name for several agents. The article’s main purpose aimed at castigating several leaders of the religious reawakening in Russia and labeling them as dangerous enemies. The article particularly targeted Fr. Gleb.
Roshchin set his accusations within the framework of a conspiracy directed against the Soviet state. Although Yakunin and his associates professed to be Orthodox and claimed to have a religious mission, Roshchin argued that their activities had nothing to do with religion. Rather, their actions were entirely political and their primary motivation was state subversion. Yakunin and his associates conspired with “foreign centers of reactionary propaganda exploiting the ignorance of people in the West,” misrepresenting religious freedom, and calling for outside interference in the legal processes of the Soviet state.4
In his assertion about “reactionary centers” in foreign countries, Roshchin cited one main example: the publishing enterprise of the San Francisco entrepreneur Henry Dakin. Roshchin accused Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regel′son as being in Dakin’s employment. He quoted from one of Regel′son’s letters to Dakin: “It is important to have such a collection [of documents] published in English. I entrust you with the authority to conduct all the necessary negotiations and to sign contracts in my name, observing all the usual practices adopted in the West for such publications.”5
By referencing this letter, which the police had uncovered in Regel′son’s correspondence, Roshchin hoped to portray Yakunin and Regel′son as petty parasites whose chief motivation was personal enrichment gained by surreptitiously providing materials to a hostile agency in the United States. Roshchin, it should be noted, made no attempt to describe the contents of the documents that Yakunin and Regel′son had transmitted. He depicted these materials simply as commercial instruments that spread “falsehoods discrediting the Soviet regime.”6
Roshchin’s article included severe criticism of others in addition to Yakunin and Regel′son, and claimed they had gone astray: Aleksandr Ogorodnikov, Fr. Dmitrii Dudko, and Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov. He presented each one as a vile human being who lacked integrity, spread false teachings, and indefatigably slandered the Soviet state. Roshchin depicted Levitin-Krasnov, a prolific essayist who had recently emigrated to Switzerland, as an associate of émigré publications hostile to the Soviet regime. He portrayed Ogorodnikov as a misguided, undisciplined, failed former student who was also a parasite in the Soviet state. Roshchin labeled Fr. Dmitrii a pastor who poisoned the minds of Soviet youth and lacked any loyalty to his homeland. Each of these people Roshchin castigated as essentially dishonest, corrupt, and dangerous. But what ran throughout his malicious presentation was an effort to criticize their influence on the young. In hindsight, Roshchin’s article offered a forecast of how the Soviet police soon intended to act.
It would have been out of character for Fr. Gleb Yakunin not to respond to the article in Literaturnaia gazeta. The attack on him personally did not trouble him as much as the misrepresentation of facts and the moral justification that the author used for his attack. On April 27, Yakunin called a press conference to which he invited Russian and Western correspondents. Convened in the Moscow home of Fr. Dmitrii Dudko, the meeting began with Fr. Gleb’s emotional statement in which he emphasized the significance of the article’s appearance and its timing. We Christians, he said, “are not surprised by the attempt to define us in a moral and spiritual sense—which is one of the features of the article. This method has been used continually over the last sixty years in antireligious propaganda during the struggle against religion. The historical roots of this method of slander and lies emanated from the first centuries of Christian existence, when it was used in the Roman Empire to instigate the heathen mobs against Christians.”7
Declaring that neither he nor other members of the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights could be broken by scurrilous attacks in the press or by police arrests, Yakunin asserted their willingness to suffer for a cause they considered just. He made clear that he and the others would not submit to threats by the police, and he made his case by references to Soviet history. Since the 1917 Revolution, the government had succeeded in destroying many aspects of Russian culture, but it had not succeeded, Yakunin said, in vanquishing religious believers. Despite intensive, nearly continuous efforts by the government, the faithful had survived and were even stronger than ever, and this, he said, gave him hope.8 He also admitted that he was buoyed by support from outside the Soviet Union: “If the repression of the movement for the defense of human rights and spiritual values causes protests all over the world, then repression against Christians, especially those who defend the interests of the church, causes a stronger reaction from the brothers in faith, fellow believers, and all Christians. Such persecution only causes a stronger religious revival, which is a result completely contrary to the aims of the oppressors.”9
Most important, at the press conference, Yakunin addressed what he called an ideological “crisis” developing in Moscow and Leningrad, which had begun to spread into the provincial cities of the Soviet Union. “The violence directed at the clergy and their flock, which we observed in the twenties, has now disappeared,” he said.10 To deal with this change, the government concocted fantasies, Yakunin argued, conspiracy theories based on fear, in an effort to revive the atmosphere of the 1930s, in which the police accused dissenting individuals of engaging in espionage and terrorism.11
The case Yakunin made against his attackers had both strength and weakness. The strength lay in his attempt to establish facts and call out fanaticism, based on charges of espionage and terrorism, which lacked concrete evidence. In addition, he spoke correctly and passionately about the growing search among Soviet youth for new ways of thinking about human purpose and community life as well as the increasing interest in religion. He could also point to the large outpouring of people who attended the recent Easter services.12
The weakness concerned his optimistic conviction that he lived on the cusp of a powerful religious awakening in Russia. He remained certain that the wave of new recruits to student circles represented a transformational moment. He was a hopeful person who repeatedly saw new possibilities and promising beginnings, although he often overestimated their widespread support. He also underestimated both the power of the Soviet government to stifle the leading voices of this religious movement and the desire of hard-liners in the government and conservatives in the Orthodox Church to preserve the status quo.
As noted earlier, it would be two years before the KGB arrested Fr. Gleb. In the interim, between the article in Literaturnaia gazeta and his arrest, Yakunin continued his work on the Christian Committee; the next two years proved to be extremely productive, despite warnings from the KGB that he needed to curtail his work (see chapter 5). Knowing that they likely faced arrest and imprisonment, Yakunin and his associates recruited other members to take their place. Boldly announcing that the government would not shut down the committee, Yakunin said that trust was far stronger than threats of force and that the committee had several members prepared to step in at any moment when called upon.13 On December 29, 1977, he announced that Vadim Shcheglov had become a member of the committee and was told that he had “a mandate, if the police arrested the committee’s founding members to release the names of others—and there were many—who wished to join, and to make them members.”14
Although Yakunin did not announce their names, at least three other people had agreed to join the committee. None would become active members until after Yakunin’s arrest. Although they were few in number, the identity of two of them suggests the existence of priests within church circles who sympathized with the committee’s goals. The first of these, Fr. Vasilii Fonchenkov, the forty-seven-year-old son of an old Bolshevik family, had rebelled against his family’s values at the age of eighteen and become a Christian. After graduating from the Moscow Theological Academy, he had held a position in the Department for External Church Relations, and in the late 1970s, he taught courses at the Moscow Theological Academy and the Theological Seminary, at the latter on the Constitution of the USSR. The second member was Fr. Nikolai Gainov, a forty-four-year-old native from the Yaroslavl region. After working in a factory, he had spent time in the Soviet army before converting to Christianity. Gainov entered the Moscow Theological Seminary in 1960, and upon graduation four years later, he was ordained a priest; in the late 1970s, he served as a parish priest in a village near Moscow.15 Neither Fonchenkov nor Gainov saw the work of the committee as something hidden from the state. They participated in order to bring actual state practices in line with state laws, with Fr. Vasilii expressing the desire that his involvement not jeopardize his teaching position at the academy or seminary.16
Given the large number of arrests the KGB made between 1976 and 1979, it is surprising that the police waited so long before moving against Yakunin. Yakunin wondered, too, at his April 27, 1977, press conference. He thought the hesitancy could be explained by the fear that the arrests of those who defended the church would only strengthen the religious revival then taking place in the country.17 Another explanation might have been the belief that his arrest would provoke a severe response from Christian organizations abroad similar to the strong support that the persecution of Pastor Georgi Vins had elicited earlier.
Another explanation for the delay is perhaps even more convincing. Yakunin and his associates had not broken any state laws. They had not held any public demonstrations, threatened violence, or violated the public order. Instead, they had simply insisted that the government uphold its own laws, its written constitutional responsibilities.18 Searching for an ostensible legal reason justifying Yakunin’s arrest, the police could find none. They had only one remaining recourse: to bring a political charge.
Disputing the Party
Until 1977, the laws of the Soviet state and the ideological aspirations of the Communist Party overlapped, although occasionally they came into conflict, and when divergences took place, Soviet courts had to reconcile them. The 1977 Constitution (known as the Brezhnev Constitution) aimed to clarify the relationship between the state and the party by asserting that the social and political goals of the party took precedence over all other activities in the Soviet Union. Thus, the highest moral and legal claims of the individual were determined by a minority party. Unlike the two earlier Constitutions, in 1924 and 1936, the 1977 Constitution, for the first time, conflated the Communist Party with the state and left no doubt about the party’s supremacy: “The leading and guiding force of the Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, of all state organizations and public organizations, is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The CPSU exists for the people and serves the people.”19
Invited to respond to the draft copy of the new Constitution, many citizens wrote to President Brezhnev, and the Christian Committee did likewise. In its letter to Brezhnev, the committee pointed out the dangerous precedents established by the new Constitution. For the first time, the committee emphasized, the document no longer separated the state and the party, but instead merged the party’s ideological platform with the national laws. For the church, this move had disastrous consequences, the Christian Committee correctly argued:
A believer cannot agree with the Constitutional legalization of compulsory godlessness for the whole of society. In fact, the Preamble and Article 6 of the Draft set out the theses of the party program, which have now been elevated to the status of national law. Therefore, the borderlines between the Party and the state are obliterated, and the Soviet citizen’s passport becomes a communist’s party card. The Draft of the new Constitution, turns the Soviet state, by a legal document, into an ideocratic-totalitarian state.20
The party newspaper Pravda printed a large number of letters sent by Soviet citizens, but it did not publish the letter from Yakunin and his associates.21 Shortly afterward, on behalf of parents whom the laws prohibited from providing religious instruction to their children, the Christian Committee reached out to the BBC, Voice of America, and Deutsche Welle and asked them to broadcast programs for children in Russian.22
On November 1, 1979, the police arrested Gleb Yakunin in his Moscow home and transported him to the Lefortovo Prison, the home of the KGB. As previously mentioned, on the same day, the police also arrested the prominent human rights spokesperson Tat′iana Mikhailovna Velikanova (1932–2002). Like Yakunin, despite threats from the police, she had not ceased her work as an editor of the main vehicle for publicizing human rights abuses, the prominent samizdat newspaper A Chronicle of Current Events. And also like Yakunin, the prospect of imminent arrest had neither cowed her nor prevented the international distribution of her publications. Since 1970, when she began to write for the samizdat bimonthly publication A Chronicle of Current Events, she collected and publicized violations of court procedures and civil liberties by political authorities throughout the Soviet Union. She became a champion of the defenseless, an unfettered voice for people who had no other recourse against the arbitrary use of state power, and, according to a close friend, a person “who is steadfast and fearless in her unequal fight with evil.”23 Andrei Sakharov described her as the embodiment of the “moral inspiration of the human rights movement, its purity and force, and its historical significance.”24 Velikanova’s arrest by the police on November 1, 1979, sought to still her voice and restore the silence.
The arrests of Yakunin and Velikanova were not unrelated. Both set the stage for other notable arrests that soon followed. Yakunin and Velikanova each had a long history going back to the 1960s of protests against the regime. They viewed their causes as moral efforts to protect the sanctity of individual rights and human dignity against arbitrary power. To agents of the police state, both of them threatened the principle that the party, not the laws of the state, constituted the “leading and guiding force of the Soviet society.”25 Their arrests left their families behind, in Yakunin’s case his wife Iraida and three children, Mariia, Aleksandr, and Anna (figure 6.1).
The arrest of Fr. Gleb Yakunin on that same November day struck a blow at the heart of the religious liberty movement. Like Velikanova, he had broken the silence and revealed falsehoods about the frequent claims concerning religious freedom. His voice, like hers, transcended national boundaries, reaching out to supportive organizations in the defense of individual rights. His was a searing voice that came from an uncommon source—not from secular society, but from within the Orthodox Church. As the previous pages have repeatedly shown, Yakunin had also turned his critical eye on the church, observing with disdain its complicity with the government and its refusal to stand up for the persecuted. In recent years, he and his associates had displayed little hesitation in trying to fill part of the void left by the church hierarchy’s reluctance to speak.
FIGURE 6.1. Yakunin’s family, in a photo taken soon after his arrest in 1979, from left to right, daughter Mariia, son Aleksandr, daughter Anna, and Iraida Georgievna. Courtesy of the Keston Center for Religion, Politics, and Society, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.
Velikanova’s trial took place August 26–29, 1980, immediately after the closing ceremonies of the Moscow Olympics. Charged with anti-Soviet activities and cooperation with the West to the detriment of her own country, the outcome of her trial was predetermined from the outset. Remembering the farce that she had witnessed at other trials, Velikanova refused to participate in her defense and remained mute throughout the proceedings. She received a severe sentence of four years in a prison camp and five years’ internal exile in the far north (figure 6.2).
As stated earlier, Fr. Gleb Yakunin waited nearly nine months for his trial and for his fate to be determined, a month longer than the Soviet legal standard between arraignment and trial. During the interim, the police moved quickly to terminate the activities of other outspoken defenders of religious liberty and human rights. On December 24, they arrested Fr. Gleb’s colleague Lev Regel′son in Tallinn, where he had gone into hiding to avoid apprehension. On January 15, 1980, Fr. Dmitrii Dudko was arrested at his church in Grebnevo, a village 19 miles east of Moscow, where the church had reassigned him. On January 22, the police took Andrei Sakharov into custody and exiled him to Gorky (Nizhnii Novgorod), 260 miles east of Moscow.26 On March 12, the KGB arrested Yakunin’s associate Viktor Kapitanchuk.
FIGURE 6.2. Tat′iana Velikanova in exile, 1984. Courtesy of the Keston Center for Religion, Politics, and Society, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.
During these early months of 1980, the police moved against former members of the Christian Seminar. On January 8, a Soviet court tried Tat′iana Shchipkova, the Smolensk teacher and prominent member of the seminar, sentencing her to three years in a labor camp. The state charged her with “malicious hooliganism” for an incident that took place during the search of her apartment when she refused to relinquish a book and struck a police officer after he twisted her arm.27 On January 8, the KGB arrested two other leading seminar members: Viktor Popkov, a Smolensk worker, and Vladimir Burtsev, a Moscow technician. Neither man had broken any laws, but they were arraigned under a false charge of “forgery” and tried jointly in Smolensk on April 8 and 9. The presiding judge sentenced each of them to eighteen months in a labor camp.28
Yakunin’s arrest had thus taken place during a wave of police attempts to obliterate groups to which he was connected. His arrest did not pass unnoticed within the Soviet Union, where some of his strongest supporters resided. On November 4, an open letter signed by twenty-three people and published in samizdat expressed sympathy for him and praised the Christian Committee he founded. “In a society where atheism is the state’s ideology,” the authors wrote, “the Committee represented the first real association of Christians to defend religious freedom.”29 Also in November, four leading Catholic priests in Lithuania issued a document expressing gratitude for “Fr. Yakunin’s work and his contributions to breaking down the hostility between denominations,” and appealed to the authorities to release him from custody. More than three hundred Catholic Lithuanians signed the statement.30
Outside the Soviet Union, several groups joined the protests. In England, Michael Bourdeaux and Keston College publicized the plight of Fr. Gleb, defending his activities on behalf of the oppressed and lauding his courage in the face of unrelenting pressure from the church and the state. On March 9, 1980, the Church of England sponsored an Interdenominational Service of Prayer on behalf of Gleb Yakunin, Dmitrii Dudko, and Lev Regel′son. The service took place in the historic St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church at the corner of London’s Trafalgar Square. Featuring readings from sermons, letters, and interviews of the three men, the event praised their role in defending Christian values and their suffering as a consequence. A central part of this gathering was a Russian Orthodox Service of Intercession conducted by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom.31 St. Martin-in-the-Fields symbolized the encounter between God and all humanity, a theme emphasized in the ceremony on March 9.
Although Cold War politics might have played some small part, most of the protests fell outside the purely political realm. Organized by members of the clergy and church groups, they recalled the ideals expressed by Yakunin and Regel′son in their Nairobi “Appeal” to heed the cry of persecuted humanity in the name of Christian solidarity.
Concern about Yakunin rapidly spread beyond Great Britain. On January 23, in Montreal, seventy-five people participated in a protest vigil in front of the USSR Consulate, where they prayed for the health and release of Frs. Gleb Yakunin, Dmitrii Dudko, and also Lev Regel′son. At the vigil, three priests chanted a prayer of intercession (Moleben) alternately in Slavonic, English, and French.32 On Sunday, February 24, 1980, in New York, a massive demonstration took place in defense of persecuted Christians in the Soviet Union in which supporters spoke passionately about their incarcerated brethren.33 On February 26, 1980, in Switzerland, more than nine hundred ministers, professors of theology, and students of diverse confessions signed a letter to President Brezhnev. They asked for the release of Fr. Gleb Yakunin and all those imprisoned who had participated in the Christian Seminar and cited Yakunin’s “Appeal” to the Nairobi conference.34 On March 13, in Paris, the Russian émigré newspaper Russkaia mysl′ published an article calling for increased protests from Western countries. The Soviet hierarchy, the anonymous author asserted, had assumed that little public outcry would come from other countries and that the arrests would soon be forgotten. Recalling “how highly Solzhenitsyn had valued Fr. Gleb” earlier, the letter writer hoped that Solzhenitsyn would come to Yakunin’s defense from his secure perch in the Vermont woods. “It is impossible without pain to speak about the fate of Fr. Gleb,” the author wrote, and he pleaded for continued support both from inside the Soviet Union and abroad.35
The winter and spring of 1979 to 1980, indeed, was a difficult period for Fr. Gleb Yakunin. He remained in the Lefortovo Prison, housed in a windowless, unheated cell, most of the time in solitary confinement. On the outside, the Soviet Union became ever more deeply mired in the war in Afghanistan, and in Moscow, preparations were well underway for the international Olympics, the first Olympic Games held in a Slavic-language-speaking country, and the public’s attention focused largely on those events. During these months, Yakunin faced constant interrogations and threats. From his interrogators, he learned of the arrests of his friends and associates, news that he found excruciatingly hard to bear.
Fr. Gleb’s troubles were exacerbated by the news of the surprising confession of his longtime friend and fellow priest Fr. Dmitrii Dudko. Dudko had stood by Yakunin on several occasions when other government and church officials had attacked him; Yakunin admired Dudko’s courage and his appeals to the young people who flocked to his unique sermons and open discussions. But on January 20, 1980, five days after his arrest, Soviet national television carried live a tearful, heart-rending apology from Fr. Dmitrii in which he expressed sorrow for his previous actions. He now recognized his errors, he lamented, and knew they had harmed the Soviet people. This broadcast, which drew worldwide attention, has received extensive coverage elsewhere and needs little elaboration here.36 It bears noting that Fr. Dmitrii most likely underwent severe mental and physical torment in the days leading up to his television appearance. His confession had a major psychological and spiritual impact on the Russian intelligentsia and on the legion of followers who had admired his stand for principle and truth. Yakunin had called him one of the few talented, universally respected priests active in the Soviet Union.37 The confession undermined that image.
Dudko’s act of contrition intensified the pressure on Yakunin. The police would have considered it a major coup to extract a similar act of repentance from Fr. Gleb, which would have had a complementary devastating effect on the “religious revival,” particularly among the young, in whom he had placed so much hope. In addition, he knew that the arrests of Lev Regel′son and Viktor Kapitanchuk, factored into the case the police planned to build against him. They, too, confronted lengthy, painful questioning about their relationship with Yakunin. Moreover, as KGB interrogators commonly did, they used information gleaned from them to increase the pressure on him. Extracting an admission of guilt and remorse from Fr. Gleb Yakunin, as the KGB had supposedly done with Dudko, would simultaneously destroy two of the most prominent proponents of religious freedom in Russia. As the historian Nicholas Ganson convincingly argues, however, an attempt to cast Dudko’s “confession” in political terms is to misrepresent his motives.38
All spring and most of the summer, Yakunin wrestled with the question of how best to proceed. He well knew that a plea of repentance would free him immediately from imprisonment. It would also allow him to provide support for his family, who otherwise faced certain deprivation as well as the taunts and insults of neighbors and classmates as the wife and children of a state villain. “Those months were particularly difficult for us and for him,” said Iraida Yakunina.39 In addition to the other problems his family faced, they underwent a third search of their apartment. The police turned their household belongings upside down looking for two items that they intended to use against Fr. Gleb: materials related to the organization of the Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights and a book written by the Russian journalist Mark Popovskii, The Life and Times of Archpriest Voino-Iasenetskii and His Circle (Zhizn′ i zhitie Voino-Iasenetskogo arkhipiskopa i khiruga). Following the Soviet censor’s rejection of the book, Popovskii had published it in Paris.40 On the eve of the unexpected police visit, a friend had delivered a copy of the book to Iraida Yakunina’s apartment. She hid it under the piano, where the police, who examined nearly everything they owned, by some miracle “never thought to look.”41
As Fr. Gleb’s wife, Iraida Yakunina was allowed only sporadic visits to the Lefortovo Prison. Each time, she found Fr. Gleb in a joyous mood, even though she knew he was suffering. “He always questioned me about myself and the children, and he inquired about all of us in detail,” she recounted.42 He gave little outward sign of the inner turmoil over the agonizing decisions he had to make, the relentless pressure he had to endure from his interrogators, or the lengthy time he spent in solitary confinement. But as the date approached for Fr. Gleb’s trial, the KGB concocted a plan to secure his confession of guilt and repentance. Before the hour of Iraida’s scheduled visit, KGB officials asked to meet with her. When she arrived at the prison, the officials escorted her into a small room. Courteous and seemingly solicitous about her welfare, they asked Iraida about her children and their future prospects. They carefully laid out the legal case and accusations against her husband. They told her of the likely consequences, including the material deprivations the family would continue to face. The officials then presented a different scenario, a much more pleasant portrayal of the future—of Fr. Gleb’s return to them, of a normal family life, and of children who would have their father with them as they grew up. Such possibilities required only Fr. Gleb’s public act of contrition and repentance. The KGB officials encouraged Iraida to present this case to her husband, and they relied on her to do so.43
The full details of the ensuing meeting between Iraida and Fr. Gleb are unknown. As always, they discussed the children’s welfare, her own well-being, and news of the day. It is highly likely that Iraida discussed the conversations she had with the KGB officials preceding the visit with her husband. Fr. Gleb rarely, if ever, considered his personal comfort, but he had great concern for the welfare of others. He told Iraida that he had recently wavered a great deal on the question of what to do, but was leaning toward accepting the KGB’s offer. Obviously, a decision had to be made, and the two of them discussed the options that lay before them and their future consequences. But it was Iraida Yakunina who, according to Fr. Gleb, made the decisive assertion: she advised her husband that he must never betray his fundamental principles. She told him that the hopes of a great many people depended on his remaining a person of moral integrity.44
The Trial Begins
Monday, August 25, 1980, began as a sunny, clear day in Moscow. The weather was slightly warmer than normal for a late summer morning, and in the parks and public gardens that endowed the city with greenery, foliage throughout the capital had not yet begun to change colors. Nevertheless, change was in the air. In this city of a little more than eight million, large numbers of people had begun their return from summer dachas to prepare for the fall and the annual beginning of the school year on September 1. For most Muscovite families, transition from the slower pace of summer was underway.
Politically, however, tension and uncertainty about the future characterized the upper echelons of the Soviet government. The army’s venture into Afghanistan eight months earlier had not resulted in a quick victory, and it had become increasingly clear that a protracted standoff might lie ahead.45 But at the moment, the most immediate worry came from a situation rapidly developing on the country’s northwestern border. Less than two weeks earlier, some seventeen thousand nonunion Polish workers, protesting rising food prices and expressing their objection to other grievances, had gone on strike and taken control of the Lenin shipyards in Gdańsk. In the following days, workers in other factories joined the movement, proclaiming their right to strike and to form an independent, self-governing trade union. On August 25, the workers, led by Lech Walesa, began calling their trade-union movement “Solidarity.”46 In Moscow, on the same day, the Politburo set up a special commission, chaired by Mikhail Suslov, the party’s chief ideologist, “to pay close attention to the situation unfolding in Polish People’s Republic” and to recommend “measures needed to be taken by Soviet leadership.”47 Worried that the strikes might spread across the Soviet border, the Politburo soon made plans to move military forces to the northwestern frontier.
On August 25, the day the government had set for Fr. Gleb’s trial, a small crowd of his relatives and supporters as well as members of the foreign press gathered outside Moscow’s city court waiting for permission to enter the building. The public announcement had proclaimed that it would be an “open trial.” When police officials unlocked the courtroom doors, however, they refused entrance to supporters and journalists, saying that the courtroom had already filled to capacity. They allowed admittance to Fr. Gleb’s wife, Iraida, but all others were told that they could not be accommodated and that they should go home. Lord Baron Carrington, the British foreign secretary who had the assignment of representing the British government, was denied entrance. Those supporters who remained witnessed four KGB officers who were escorted to seats in the courtroom; all of them had participated in house searches or interrogations of various Christian Seminar members.
In organizing the trial, the police left little either to chance or to the opportunity for Fr. Gleb to use the proceedings for his own benefit. They packed the courtroom with students and workers, the “people’s representatives,” who had no sympathy for him. Iraida Yakunina was permitted to secure a defense lawyer for her husband, but she had not succeeded in doing so and consequently had to rely on a court-appointed counsel, L. M. Popov, a less than mediocre trial attorney. The prosecutor, Procurator G. I. Skaredov, had issued summonses to eleven witnesses. They included Yakunin’s associates Viktor Kapitanchuk and Lev Regel′son, both of whom awaited their own trials in the Lefortovo Prison; Viktor Popkov, a participant in the Christian Seminar; A. I. Osipov, a professor at the Moscow Theological Academy; Fr. Superior Iosif Pustoutov, head of postgraduate studies at the Moscow Theological Academy; Feliks Karelin, a former friend of Yakunin’s; a churchwarden; a financial administrator; and several of Fr. Gleb’s acquaintances, with whom he was alleged to have had extremist conversations. The court did not permit Yakunin to call any witnesses.48
The judge assigned to hear the case, Valentina G. Lubentsova, had a history of presiding over trials of prominent dissenters. A seasoned, tough, rigid person, she had first presided at the trial of the Moscow Seven in 1968. She had handed down particularly severe sentences to the young demonstrators who had protested the Soviet army’s actions against the Prague reformers. She had also heard the case of Vladimir Bukovsky, the Russian-born, British human rights activist, who played a prominent role in the Soviet human rights movement. Most recently, in May 1978, Lubentsova had presided over the trial of Yuri Orlov, at which she had refused to allow him to call witnesses to speak in his own defense.49 There, again, she displayed her severe manner, inflexibility, and ruthlessness. Her appearance at Yakunin’s trial did not bode well for the defendant.
As the trial began, Judge Lubentsova read the state’s charge against Yakunin: his alleged violation of Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. Used repeatedly against individuals who dissented from the laws of the state, Article 70 prohibited the publication, dissemination, or possession of literature with an anti-Soviet message.50 She then read the indictment. Lubentsova cited numerous letters and appeals that Yakunin had allegedly composed, most importantly, an “Appeal to the Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches” and an “Appeal to Christians in Portugal.” Judge Lubentsova asked for Yakunin’s response. He replied, “Not guilty.”51
On the first afternoon of the trial, the public procurator Skaredov called to testify three individuals who knew Yakunin well, two of whom had worked closely with him. Skaredov had summoned all three from their cells in the Lefortovo Prison. First, the judge turned to Yakunin and asked whether he had taken part in the writing and distribution of the above-mentioned letter and appeals. “Yes, I took part,” Yakunin responded. The procurator then called on Lev Regel′son and inquired about his connection with the materials cited in the indictment of Fr. Gleb. He admitted that he had participated in the composition of several of them. But he especially wished “to underscore, however, that during the writing of the documents, Fr. Gleb always pointed out the reasons for their composition: their importance to religious believers and to the defense of Orthodoxy, and he opposed inserting in them any political assertions.”52 The procurator next summoned Viktor Kapitanchuk and asked him about his work with Fr. Gleb on the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights. Kapitanchuk admitted that he had taken an active part. The procurator then asked him whether he acknowledged that “these documents contained slanderous and deliberately false fabrications that discredit the Soviet social and state system.” Kapitanchuk replied that he did not acknowledge this claim.53
The third witness summoned by the prosecutor had been a very active participant in the Christian Seminar. The police had arrested Viktor Popkov nearly two years earlier, and the court had sentenced him to punishment in a labor camp, where he had already spent a year and a half. The primary reason the procurator summoned Popkov related to an alleged meeting with a British member of Parliament, David Atkinson, who, during a trip to Moscow, had made contact with Yakunin and several other religious activists, including Popkov. Asked whether Fr. Gleb had attended the meeting with Atkinson and other members of the British delegation, Popkov responded that Yakunin had played a leading part in the conversation. When questioned, Popkov recounted that he had seen Yakunin give Atkinson a small packet, although he had no idea of its contents.54 In responding to the procurator’s questions, Popkov simply told the truth, but the questions to which he responded helped build the procurator’s case that Fr. Gleb’s loyalties were not to the Soviet state.
The next day, Procurator Skaredov further developed the main lines of his attack on Yakunin. He called nine witnesses, among them Aleksandr Il′ia Osipov and Fr. Superior Iosif Pustoutov. Both men had been present in Nairobi as members of the Soviet delegation when the World Council of Churches received the “Appeal” sent by Yakunin and Regel′son, and both willingly testified to its impact on the Nairobi Assembly. A self-assured, well-spoken, religiously conservative teacher, then at the beginning of a long academic career, Osipov specialized in the history of theology. He tended to downplay as insignificant voices that did not conform to his views of history or theology.55 He dismissed the influence of the “Appeal,” claiming that it had little impact on the session to which he had been assigned. When pressed by the prosecutor to state his views on the document itself, he said he considered it “anti-government.”56 The state prosecutor then summoned to the stand Fr. Superior Iosif, who took an approach different from Osipov’s. He had not attended the Nairobi Assembly as a representative of the Moscow Patriarchate, but as a private person. The “Appeal,” he said, had produced a negative response from some of the delegates, whom he called “uninformed” about the true situation in the Soviet Union, and it had undermined the Soviet delegation’s standing in the Assembly.57 He considered the document written by Yakunin and Regel′son to be slanderous and biased. It had distracted the Assembly from pursuing much more important matters, such as “the unity of World Christians, the struggle against racism and the danger of war, disarmament, and a just settlement of the Middle East crisis.”58
During the remainder of the second day and continuing into the third, the procurator called witnesses who testified about Fr. Gleb’s character and his “deleterious actions” concerning the Soviet state. Interestingly, Feliks Karelin, with whom Fr. Gleb had once enjoyed a close relationship, turned out to be a severe critic: he labeled the documents Yakunin had written as efforts to undermine the Soviet government and the Constitution.59 Other witnesses made scurrilous attacks on Fr. Gleb, claims without any supportive evidence: of his receiving money from Solzhenitsyn, making insulting remarks about the KGB and Soviet leaders, harboring hatred for the authorities, betraying the Soviet people, and engaging in the illicit trade of icons for personal gain.
Although the trial proceedings were deadly serious, they also had farcical moments and unanticipated developments. A Fr. Krivoi from the city of L′vov, assigned to besmirch Yakunin’s moral reputation, accused him of once drinking two bottles of vodka, whereupon Yakunin retorted: “Over what period of time?”60 Another witness, Aleksandr Shushpanov, churchwarden of the Nikolo-Kuznetskaia Church in central Moscow, who had served for many years in the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations, was known to Fr. Gleb as a KGB agent. The procurator had prepared him to testify about Yakunin’s contacts with the West. When Shushpanov entered the courtroom, he immediately began shouting, nearly in a frenzy, that Fr. Gleb “was an abettor of imperialism and an anti-Sovietist and that he belonged in the dock.”61
This was not the only incident that failed to remain entirely on script. Several other witnesses did not deliver the testimony that the procurator expected. The head priest at the last church Yakunin had served reported that Fr. Gleb had never given him any documents to read and that he had not observed anything illegal in the accused’s behavior. In another unexpected incident, the procurator called to testify E. B. Zagryazkina, who worked as the financial administrator in a church Fr. Gleb had served for many years. The procurator had carefully prepared her, and in pretrial testimony, she had expressed her willingness to cooperate. But when called to the stand, she changed her mind. Praising the respect that many priests and believers had for Fr. Gleb, she wanted to add some personal words about him. Zagryazkina said that “in all her life, she had never met such a decent, honest, good, brave, and moral man as Fr. Yakunin.”62 Judge Lubentsova asked her about her testimony in the pretrial investigation, in which the witness had mentioned Fr. Gleb’s role in buying and selling church valuables. The judge continued to press Zagryazkina on this issue, but she refused to provide any evidence.63
As court opened on the fourth day, Judge Lubentsova pressed forward in an attempt to conclude the trial. She had heard enough to render a verdict, and she denied the request of Yakunin’s defense attorney’s to summon Fr. Dmitrii Dudko, whose name had come up several times in the proceedings. The judge called for the procurator’s closing statement. The court had fully proved, he said, the guilt of Fr. Gleb, whom he called a criminal, an enemy of the country and the church, a degenerate, and, referring to the testimony of Fr. Krivoi, a drunkard.64
Fr. Gleb then had the opportunity to make his final speech. He asked the judge whether the “court and the public here were interested in the facts that motivated me to act in defense of the human rights of Christians?” Judge Lubentsova cut him off and replied that the court had no interest. She told him instead that he could make a final plea for mercy, an offer he rejected. While Judge Lubentsova likely expected his remorse or perhaps a lengthy, tearful proclamation of his innocence, to her surprise, she heard neither. Gleb’s final speech consisted of only one sentence: “I thank God for the fate he has given me.” The court sentenced him to five years in strict-regime camps and five years in exile. As Judge Lubentsova pronounced the court’s decision, television cameras recorded the scene for showing later that evening on the news.65
On August 28, following the trial’s conclusion, a small crowd outside the Moscow city courthouse stood by helplessly. As a green van pulled slowly away, the prisoner’s weeping aunt threw pink gladioli against its darkened back window.66 Several in the crowd tried to comfort the prisoner’s disconsolate wife, the mother of his three children. Inside the police van, Fr. Gleb Yakunin took a final look at his loved ones gathered nearby on the street. He did not know whether he would ever see them again.67
In retrospect, the internal dynamics of Fr. Gleb Yakunin’s trial illustrate the conflict between law and ideology. “The court is not interested,” the wording of Judge Lubentsova’s reply to Yakunin’s offer to speak to the motivations underlying his actions testified to the court’s lack of concern with getting to the truth as well as its predetermined view of what the trial’s outcome had to be. The prosecutor’s lack of concern about legal standards, the reliance on claims without supporting evidence, the general nature of the indictment without reference to underlying legal statutes, and the behavior of many of the witnesses are evidence of the court’s ideological interests. The preplanned course of the trial and the assumption of Fr. Gleb’s guilt aimed to satisfy these interests. An article published a few days later in the trade union newspaper Trud applauded the trial’s outcome: “The criminal got his just desserts. Those present in the hall, including workers and engineers from several Moscow enterprises and building sites, workers from scientific institutes, and personnel of state institutions met the court’s decision with approval.”68
“I thank God for the fate he has given me.” The one-sentence summation uttered by Fr. Gleb at the trial’s conclusion conveyed a meaning different from a political message. In these words, Yakunin referenced a significant touchstone in the Russian Orthodox tradition. They evoked memories of individuals who confronted royal authority and willingly suffered the consequences. Whether he had them directly in mind was unlikely, but the spiritual values they represented were present in his farewell statement. The image of fate recalled the great luminary of the early Church Gregory of Nazianzas (Gregory the Theologian, 325–390), one of the three fathers of the Russian Orthodox Church, who lived in an era marked by violent clashes between Christians and pagans.69 This father of the church, whom Fr. Aleksandr Men celebrated, was a lifelong seeker whose suffering caused him intense personal pain, but led to his greatest poetic achievements.70 Yakunin’s statement also expressed the self-suffering values of Russia’s first canonized saints, Boris and Gleb (d. 1015), who accepted voluntary suffering and death in imitation of Christ. Hearing the court’s verdict, Yakunin understood its consequences and the suffering that awaited him.